Computing and Relaying: Utilizing Mobile Edge Computing for P2P Communications

Besides increasing the computing capacity of edge devices, mobile edge computing (MEC) can also be utilized to help communication. This paper proposes an MEC-assisted computing and relaying scheme to enhance the throughput of uncompressed data for mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) communications. We assume that the target data has a dynamic compression rate during the transmission from one mobile device to another through a relay node with MEC. In order to obtain the optimal transmission and compression strategy for the mobile devices and the relay node, a cost function that defines the tradeoff between energy consumption and latency time is investigated first. Then a closed-form solution is derived by minimizing the cost function with respect to practical constraints. Compared with conventional P2P communications without MEC, the proposed model breaks the bottleneck of P2P communications by decoupling the data compression rates at the two sides of MEC server. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.